{geni:occupation} Professor of Literature
{geni:about_me} Well-wrought fiction can turn readers into mind readers, via characters on the page. In academic essays and books, Dorrit Cohn meticulously showed how some of the world’s most enduring authors performed such magic.
“In this wonderfully subtle way, it’s almost a sleight of hand,’’ said Maria Tatar, a professor of Germanic languages and literature at Harvard University and one of Dr. Cohn’s longtime friends. “She understood at a deep level howauthors do this, how authors get us inside the minds of characters and show us what they are thinking, and how minds work.’’
Having initially studied physics before pursuing literature in graduate school, Dr. Cohn cast an almost clinical eye on the sometimes murky world of sentences and stories.
“She was someone who possessed true finesse and yet had a kind of rigor that we associate with science,’’ Tatar said. “There was a kind of mathematical precision to her work. She had an exquisite literary sensibility and was ableto see things in text that no one had discovered before. She understood the sorcery of words.’’
Dr. Cohn, who was among the early tenured female professors at Harvard, where she taught for 24 years and was the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature emeritus, died March 10 in her Durham, N.C., home of complications of Parkinson’s disease.
She was 87 and had moved to North Carolina from Cambridge, where for nearly four decades she lived in a book-lined apartment overlooking the Charles River.
“She was a wonderful reader and explainer of how stories work,’’ said her son Steve, who lives in Durham and is director of Duke University Press.
“She was also someone who liked order,’’ he added. “I think that reflects in her scholarly work. What she was trying to do was to take a very complicated and varied set of literary works and ways of telling stories and make orderout of them. I think that’s what she was especially good at and what people value in her work.’’
Dr. Cohn was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship just before joining Harvard’s faculty. She received the Radcliffe Graduate Society Medal in 1982, and the Phi Beta Kappa teaching award at Harvard in 1984.
“Dorrit Cohn is a superior reader of texts,’’ Irene Kacandes, a Dartmouth College professor, wrote on the website for the International Society for the Study of Narrative, which presented Dr. Cohn with the Wayne C. Booth LifetimeAchievement Award last year.
“She has given us unforgettable readings of authors we thought we knew and introduced us to several we might never have encountered otherwise,’’ Kacandes wrote, praising Dr. Cohn and her book “Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction.’’ Kacandes added that Dr. Cohn’s work “changed forever how we read’’ writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka.
In large measure, Dr. Cohn cared less about plot than “how stories are told,’’ her son said, “and in particular how people’s thoughts get translated sometimes directly and, often in the works she loved, indirectly.’’
Born in Vienna, Dorrit Zucker grew up in a family that ran successful businesses, such as manufacturing fezzes for the Turkish Army, berets that were sold in France, and furniture.
Just before the Nazis invaded Austria, she and her family fled and lived in Switzerland and France before settling in New York City.
Bilingual in German and French from childhood, she attended the Lycee Francais in Manhattan, where she added English as a third language.
Her family, meanwhile, bought a furniture factory in Vermont, while living in New York.
“My mother was kind of rebellious in that everyone else in the family was focused on money, and she was very explicitly turning her back on that and going into the world of ideas,’’ said her son Richard of New Haven, a music theory professor at Yale University.
She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1945 with a bachelor’s degree in physics. Remaining at Radcliffe, she received a master’s degree in comparative literature a year later.
“She felt that if she could learn physics, she could learn anything,’’ Richard said.
Steve added that “she used to jokingly say she wanted to know everything, and that’s why she majored in physics, because that’s what she knew the least about.’’
Entering a doctoral program in literature at Yale, she met Robert Greer Cohn, a fellow student. They married and soon had children as his career took them to Stanford University in California.
“She really let go of the intellectual academic life,’’ Steve said. “My father was a very intense intellectual, so there were certainly a lot of intellectual conversations at the dinner table, but she really let go of her own ambitions in order to be a wife and a mother to a couple of sons.’’
Her marriage ended in divorce, and she finished a doctorate in German at Stanford. Dr. Cohn taught at Indiana University and was granted tenure before moving to Harvard at a time when gender disparity was pronounced.
“Harvard University more than doubled the number of female professors on its faculty by appointing six women yesterday,’’ the Globe reported in June 1971, announcing the hiring of Dr. Cohn and five other women. “That brings the total to 11, or about 1.2 percent of the university’s 871 professors.’’
Tatar, who met Dr. Cohn in the early 1970s, called her “a wonderful mentor, role model, colleague, and friend. I think first of her warmth. She had a Viennese charm and a smile that lit up the room.’’
Still, Dr. Cohn was first and foremost a reader, and was comfortable with the often solitary nature of literary scholarship.
“She was, I would say, a fairly inward person in her personal life,’’ Richard said. “She obviously loved reading, and it suited her personality pretty well.’’
Retiring in 1995, Dr. Cohn stayed in Cambridge and in her 70s learned ancient Greek so she could read the original texts of Plato and others from the era.
She “read broadly, in a way that no one does today,’’ said Tatar, who added that although Dr. Cohn was a scholar of “tremendous erudition, she was always so modest about it.’’
A service will be announced for Dr. Cohn, who in addition to her two sons leaves four grandchildren.
On campus, Dr. Cohn “had an almost cult following’’ of students who, Tatar said, were drawn by “her charm, combined with a shining sense of integrity in the academic world.’’
And with other professors, Dr. Cohn engaged in “an old-fashioned collegiality where you didn’t just go to a talk, but you gathered after the talk and had time together to digest what had happened, to have a good meal, and to talkshop in great ways,’’ Tatar said. “She was so vibrantly engaged as a thinker.’’
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